I want to build a successful business. It’s one of those things that I really want but am not working toward effectively. Two or three years ago, I felt as though I was making progress. In the last year or so, I’ve felt stagnant. The progress I was making was slow going but it was going. Lately, not so much.
(more…)Tag: Life’s Challenges
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August 10, 2025: Stroller Buying Advice
The goal for today was just to go look at strollers to help us make sense of the descriptions we’ve been reading online. Of course, by the end of the day we had purchased one. We didn’t search far and wide for one, visiting only three stores. ChatGPT was incredibly useful when doing some research, too.
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August 5, 2025
It’s the same thing every summer. Here we are, just over halfway through, and I don’t know where the time has gone. Of course, there are more things that I would like to do than I’ll get time for, and there are the things that simply have to get done.
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April 29, 2025
The days have been whizzing by. All of a sudden, it’s time to crawl into bed, quickly followed by the option to snooze. I want so much more to happen during my waking hours. I have ideas.
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April 23, 2025
I tried to publish a blog post yesterday only to find out that the website has been down for a while. What was meant to be a quick, 15- to 20-minute thing turned into me trying to figure out DNS settings with blurry eyes until about midnight. Somehow, I ended up getting it to work.
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October 1, 2023
All I needed from today was time to sleep. After waking up, I went through my regular morning routine. Within a couple of hours, after a travel mug hit me in the face, I was ready for a nap.
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September 23, 2023
I needed an easy win today. I went to the workshop. It didn’t quite work out the way I was hoping it would.
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August 27, 2023
“I have to give this a go,” I keep telling myself. My parents reiterate the same to me when I speak with them. “If I don’t try this, I’ll always wonder what could’ve come of it.” So, I’m doing it. Most of the time, it’s pretty good. Sometimes, I get nervous.
I’m an anxious person, that I know. It’s hard for me to let things go, whether that’s a mistake I made or a new tool that I want. I fixate on what might be or could’ve been instead of what’s all in front of me. I know, truly, that I have everything I could need and more. If moving all that shit over the workshop hasn’t given me any insight into just how much I have…my optometry benefits renew in September.
Diving into this project, that of making and selling handcrafted wooden (mostly) goods, as I’ve done this summer, has been really good for me. It’s given me a focus. My mom keeps reminding me that it’s a passion of mine and it also happens to be something I’m good at. Her gentle encouragement is a result of my complete inability to accept a compliment or praise from my parents. Before now, the closest that I’d gotten to woodworking was holding the flashlight for my dad. Occasionally, I’d swing a hammer — the rusty one.
What’s really been bothering me these last few days is the cost. It’s cost a lot to get this project off the ground. While I do feel like I’m making gains, I’m the one financing all of it. Nothing is selling right now. There is no money coming in.
Yet. This is a tortoise and hare tale.
To be fair, my advertising and marketing strategy is piss poor. I’ve been spending more time trying to get myself in a position to make things. I’ve been making things, too, just not enough. There are a few pens that I need to photograph and post pictures of, though. I don’t read all the emails that I get sent about how to grow your small business. Who’s got the time for that?
It feels like I’m having trouble situating myself. Where, in all of this, do I belong? Squarely in the centre. I’m the bubble in the middle of the mind map, the one that looks like a cloud and has bold letters in it. From this position, you can only see out in front of you, not what’s beside or behind. Everything is drawn out from here and remains connected.
Right now, it’s hard for me to identify the gains that I’ve made. I’m seeing the forest, not the trees. Wood is crucial to the success of this enterprise.
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August 8, 2023
I must’ve gone on for at least half an hour, if not 45-minutes, while we were driving back from PEI, about whether I should post links to my blog posts on my Instagram Stories. It’s been on my mind for about a week. Every time I ran through an argument, I ended up at the same conclusion: I don’t know.
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July 18, 2023
The last couple of days haven’t been bad but things haven’t felt like they’re going right. It’s as if all of my actions are being tempered by a tension band. Nothing is impossible but it’s a little harder and sometimes I just don’t have the strength to follow through.
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July 11, 2023
I thought that this would be the week that I finally started getting on with getting on with things. As happens every year, I have big plans for this summer. Over the last few days, I’ve been ordering stuff online trying to get things in so that I can start working on the things that I want to be getting on with.
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